


Walkabout

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:52:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1642586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story takes place between 1984-5. And, just in case, Plaid Cymru is the Welsh nationalist party.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walkabout

**Author's Note:**

> Sincere thanks to Sageness who produced a miracle, last-minute, thoroughly sage beta. 
> 
> Written for Moebius

 

 

Will could have gone to university anywhere, of course. The acceptance letters had gathered on his desk for a few weeks, his mother tidying carefully round the envelopes from Cambridge; UCL, Edinburgh, Exeter. So when he chose to go to a polytechnic close to the Welsh border, his headmaster had driven all the way from town to the farmhouse to remonstrate with his parents.

He'd had a restful time. Registering to take History, he'd changed his programme every year until he ended up with a degree, more or less, in the newly created subject of Woodwork and Forestcraft. He didn't turn up to sit the written exams, but submitted a carving for the end of term show. The card they pinned beside it read `Will Stanton: Untitled Ornamental Piece (Unfinished?)'.

`Unfinished?'. Will liked that. And so did Barney, who was the only person Will invited to the show. It became a standing joke - "Will Stanton: Unfinished?".

When graduation was over, Will stayed on in the small house he'd rented with three other students - easy-going, hard-drinking Welshmen who hadn't wanted to stray too far from home but had wanted to get away from their das for a bit. Gradually, they drifted away, back to their families' farms, but Will wasn't ready to leave. He felt comfortable in the borderlands. It was as good a place as any to wait for something to happen.

The years after the Dark had finally retreated and Merriman had gone seemed, in retrospect, more like a dream than the adventures Will had undertaken in the two years after his eleventh birthday. His voice had broken, his brothers and sisters had drifted away from home, exams had come and gone, there'd been a girl and, later, a boy, and none of it had really touched him. He realised, when he was about seventeen, that he had been waiting five years for Merriman to come back.

Everything in the time when the Dark was rising had seemed to happen in the present tense. The colours were bright, the contrast between dark and light sharp. The events of those years had unfolded one after the other with an absolute inevitability, even in the moments of desperate battle and confusion. Will's life had moved on the narrative hinge of `and then...' He had woken up on his eleventh birthday. And then he had met Merriman and found the signs, one after the other. And then he had gone to Cornwall, and then to Wales. And then...

And then it all finished and the world had forgotten. So Will, marooned in a present which felt increasingly less real than the past, had decided to forget a little, too.

He picked up a job in the local pub and as the year went on his parents stopped trying to get him to come home. Bran came from Oxford to stay with him in the New Year. They drank in the pub after closing time, Will slowly clearing up the ashtrays and empties while Bran propped his feet on a stool and discoursed. He was busy with his M.Phil in political theory, but he was bored with it, he said, he wanted to be doing, not talking.

"I'm thinking of going into politics," Bran said. "This country's being strangled in front of our eyes. It's that or emigrate."

"You going to join Plaid Cymru are you?"

"Hah! If I wanted to be buried in Cardiff for the rest of my life maybe. No, I've met some bright people round Labour. I'll go in with them and see how they shake things up. Most of the party's still carried away with the idea of themselves as the oppressed working class. Not that many of them will be working in a few years time anyway, once the Lady's finished with them."

The _Lady_?"

"Well, you've got to admire her a little Will. She's going to drag them where they need to go. When they get tired of her, we'll step in to stick the pieces back together. Can I have a whisky?"

"Do you think she's a good leader?"

"She's strong. Mind, I'm strong. According to the Myers-Briggs, I'm an ENTP."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I'm brilliant, impulsive, stubborn, easily bored..."

"I could have told you that for free."

Bran gave him an odd, sideways look, said, "You know me too well, better than I do myself," and laughed, even helped him to clear the last few tables. Will almost missed him when he was gone.

There was no snow that year. As an early spring began to show itself, Will began to feel restless. He collected his last wages from the pub, put the house into reasonable order, packed a bag and headed north along the border, hitching if the weather was bad. He amused himself by walking for the morning on the Welsh side, then crossing to England for the afternoon. The earth felt split here, pulled in two directions and unsure where its allegiance lay. He didn't use a map, but followed the older ways he knew from Gramarye, the forgotten paths and deep lines of the earth connecting the ancient places and the energies they still held.

He moved north all spring and into summer, skirting the heaped towns of the north-west, across the high drama of the Lake District, until he reached the northern border counties, Cumbria and Northumberland. Through the warmth of July, he walked west to east, with the backpackers and the ramblers on the old Roman way, alongside the ruins of Hadrian's Wall. Blood was in the soil here, and bones, deep down. Will dreamed of beacons, lit against the dark, and of shadows. He didn't get tired, and he barely noticed where he slept. There was always a hut, or a hostel. Once or twice people took him in, and he shared a tent through several nights of sudden rain with a Scottish archaeologist, who kissed in a comforting way, when he wasn't lecturing Will on local cup and ring markings. When Will reached Newcastle, he swung south and followed the route from Jarrow. It was the road the ninth century monks had taken, running from their monasteries on the Northumberland coast to escape the Viking invaders, carrying their relics and saints' bones with them to Durham and York

Something changed after York. Will had been in a dream for months, walking and feeling the hills and the empty northern landscapes murmuring, singing to him, but he was finding it harder to hear - or to listen, he wasn't sure always which. His connection to the earth wavered, more often he found the routes he wanted to walk blocked or built over. He began to wake, and look, and it was as if he was seeing a new world, or the old one, properly for the first time. The four year miners' strike had petered out in March, the defeated miners were back at work until the inevitable closing of the pits, but Yorkshire had held out longer than most, and Will could feel the echoes of anger and desperation reverberating round the county. There were other changes too. The feeling of unease that had jolted him away from Wales was stronger. The hawthorn had budded too early and he could feel the ground gasping for water in the July heat. A river that should have run in the country south of Wakefield was dried to a trickle. There was no more rain. Will stood in the baked mud of what should have been the river's course and tried to know where the water had gone. But the Wild Magic that he should at least have been able to sense, even if it wouldn't speak to him, was missing too.

He stopped to see Jane in Nottingham where she'd started work after finishing her degree in natural sciences. She fed him and laughed at him, but didn't hide her worry about him.

"It's all very well having a bit of time out Will, but you seem a little lost to me, if you don't mind my saying so." Her flat was very tidy: plants on a sunny window sill, herbs in the kitchen, a proper set of pots and pans.

There was a photograph of them all, the Drews, himself and Bran, on her neat corner desk, on one of the last holidays in Wales when they'd been all together, the year before Simon went to university.

"We look happy here. Do you miss that time Jane? Us, like that?"

"I do, a little. Sometimes I think I remember..."

Will badly wanted to hear the end of her sentence, but he held back and didn't demand. After a while she finished it, in a way that answered his unspoken question.

"I think that... childhood is like a dream. We all wake up from it but it stays with us, half pain, half pleasure. Sometimes I feel so like the child I was that all of this," she gestured to the well-ordered flat, "doesn't seem real, as if it will all melt away and I'll be back in my true life, whatever that is."

She shook her head ruefully. "I would hate to be a child again of course. I _like_ all of this - my life, my choices. And I was awfully straight as a child, always afraid of being wrong, or _bad_. I wanted to be a good girl rather too much.. But still... I have a feeling that childhood contains the truth of ourselves if we are brave enough to face it."

"Perhaps," Will said. "Or maybe it's impossible to remember the truth because to grow up you have to forget it. Childhood is what you leave. We all have to leave ourselves."

"Will, you should have read philosophy, not woodwork." She looked down, fiddled with her glass, wanting to change the subject. "So, how's Bran? Have you seen him?" Will had known it was coming, and smiled at her.

"Oh you know, he wants to rule the world."

"He wrote and told me that he came to see you at New Year."

"He did."

"And...?"

"We got drunk, Jenny-oh. Talked some nonsense. Leave it."

He told her instead about the hawthorn and the river in Wakefield and the sense he had that the weather was strange. She explained the work she was doing which touched on climatic changes: they were pretty sure that average temperatures were rising year on year but they didn't have a pattern yet.

After a few days of rest and talk, she gave him some money and Barney and Simon's addresses in London. He stayed with Barney who was gamefully trying out bohemia in a squat in Borough, just south of the river, and nominally attending art college. Simon, living in a Canary Wharf flat suitably smart for his new city-lawyer image, took them out for dinner one night, but when they met at the door of Nobu, he took one look at their clothes, shuddered, and steered them round the corner to a pub instead. Simon drank a lot and spoke of how difficult it was to retain personal ethics in the face of professional pressures, how his firm were currently involved in the purchase of as much of London social housing as possible. A property boom was coming, he told them. Mrs Thatcher's scheme to allow council tenants to buy their homes was going to change everything. For some, it was good news, but not everyone could afford to buy. The poor would be left in the worst estates, councils would lose their precious stock of affordable properties. Meanwhile, Simon's department was in charge of easing through applications to build out into London's green belt.

Barney argued with his brother in an easy-going, sleepily teasing sort of way, reminding him of the high ideals he'd gone into law with, how he was going to stand up for justice and fight for truth. Simon acted the supercilious older brother, lecturing Barney about economic realities, but Will could sense his bafflement at the way the world turned out to work.

It was the end of August and the London air was heavy with heat, sweat, the smell of beery piss in the streets. The city was loud in Will's mind. He could feel its materials between in his fingertips, its force thrummed beneath his feet, pulling him from street to street. In the long hot days, which Barney slept through, he followed the city's tug, tracing lines of power around the streets. He walked the routes of London's underground rivers, the Fleet, the Effra and the Quaggy, tributaries of the Thames and the Lea, now built over and bricked in. Caged as they were, they still spoke to him. The River Walbrook snaked through the heart of the city, west to east: the Romans had built their Temple to Mithras on its banks and later, when Londinium became Caer Londein the invading Saxons had used it as the boundary between themselves and the defeated British. Skulls had been excavated in the Walbrook mud, thought to be soldiers of Boudicea's rebel army, although a different story told of a group of Roman legionnaires, captured and decapitated, their heads thrown into the river. Sometimes the competing stories became too loud to bear, filling Will's head with confused images, and he would go back to Barney's place and drink whatever was going to block them out.

Autumn came and the city began to feel like a trap as the nights closed in, and in November he left, escaping south west, avoiding the Thames valley and heading down towards Wiltshire instead. It took him a month to walk to Glastonbury, where he climbed the Tor on a freezing morning so that he would have it to himself. The weak December sun hadn't cleared the mist from the Vale below and he could almost feel something there. But he was too aware of the town below, the traffic noise reached him even up on the Tor, and when he came down, the chattery tourist centre, with its guides to the Abbey and Arthur's grave, destroyed the last vestiges of connection with the Vale. He wasted some time in the slightly desperate mystic-hippy shops, smiling over dream-catchers and the brisk trade in fake crystals, and bought Bran a postcard featuring a luridly rendered Arthur, emblazoned with the words `The Once and Future King' in faked-up Gothic script.

It was getting colder, still not as cold as it should have been at this time of year. The day before Solstice, he found a lift with a couple of friendly Druids who were making their annual pilgrimage to Stonehenge. As soon as they offered him a place in their clapped out van, he found himself believing that this was the sign he'd been waiting for. The taste... the tension in the air he'd felt on top of the Tor made him so sure that Merriman would find him and Stonehenge would be the place.

At the stone circle, Will and the Druids bought their tickets, took their helpful National Trust leaflets and wandered around the site. Since the Battle of the Beanfield in June, when the police had broken a few heads preventing a group of new age travellers from holding their midsummer festival, there were fences and security all round the Henge. After a cold day of waiting, watching the flow of tourists, Will was chucked out by security guards in florescent jackets and wandered back to the road. After that, there was nowhere left to go. He spent the night in Salisbury then hitched a lift from a London bound lorry driver who dropped him by the strip lights of South Mimms service station. He had £2.49 left in his pocket. Enough for a cup of tea, and then... he didn't know what would happen after that.

Will sat with his tea at a sticky table underneath a speaker dribbling out a string of tinny muzak carols, by a long picture window overlooking the stream of traffic below. The garish lights of the slot machines and video games blinked from their little den. Will wondered why anyone would want to play a game where you pretended to drive along a road as a break from driving along a road. Pale, knackered looking people ate vile food under the harsh lights and the limp Christmas decorations served only to underline how thin and mean everything was. Will tried not to hear the squabbles of the family sitting across from him "Get _off_ ,...It wasn't _me_... I don't care who it was you little sods... eat your fuckin' chips and shut the fuck up..."

It occurred to him that he had the power to set this place, and all the others like it ablaze. He could chase these pointless, stupid creatures out of his land, his Britain, and make it as it should be again. Hadn't he, at eleven, fought back the Dark? He deserved some kind of reward for that, not endless years of agony watching these greedy fools destroy their world and eat themselves alive. The country was losing its memory, embracing an amnesiac, ugly present and wilfully ignoring the resonances of its past. They needed to be shown... they needed to see what real power was and what it meant. They were worse than useless on their own...

And then, Merriman, cup in hand, was sitting opposite him.

"Terrible tea," Merriman said.

Will met Merriman's eyes. He could say nothing for a long while. Finally, he managed, "I've been looking for you."

"I know."

"I needed you."

"You have been walking. What have you seen?"

"Nothing good. Why are you here? Is there trouble?" Will realised he sounded eager.

Merriman didn't answer. He asked instead, "How are the others? The Drews?"

It took Will a moment to understand he was supposed to answer this mundane question.

"Well, Simon is busy selling off the countryside, and Barney thinks he's free. Bran wants to go into politics. Someone told him he had nascent leadership qualities. Jane's the only one who seems to remember anything."

"You mustn't blame them Will. They have to find their own ways in the world, and the memories of their other selves are buried very deep."

"It's not just them who have forgotten. It's this country, Merriman. What they're doing... poison in the fields, empty seas, dead rivers. Look at this place." He threw a disgusted look around at the café.

Merriman followed his eyes. "Not, I agree, the high point of twentieth century architecture."

Will leant across the table and hissed, "How can I live in this world, seeing what I've seen? All that beauty, and richness: Miss Greythorne's party, Caer Wydyr. To this... It's not enough to know that it's out there somewhere, that I can hear it in my head. I have to live _here_."

"Will," Merriman shook his head, smiling. "I once lived in Camelot."

"But the Old Magic, even the High Magic, is in danger Merriman. They're building roads over the Old Ways. There's a bypass going through the ley at Twyford. Why do they need so many bloody _roads_?"

"The Old Magic is still there, in the earth, and a few roads more or less won't trouble it."

"But it's different even from when I was a child. Things move faster and people are harder. And there's something - I don't know yet - but there's something wrong with the weather. It doesn't snow like it used to."

"I would have thought you had seen enough snow in the year you woke to satisfy you."

Will gave up in the face of Merriman's infuriating calm.

"Why are you here Merriman?"

Merriman drank some tea and placed his cup carefully back on to its smeary saucer. "I didn't come because there's any danger from the Dark, or from any outside force."

Will tried to listen for the Old One speech below the spoken words, but there was nothing. He searched Merriman's face for any vestige of meaning, waited for the usual flow of silent communication that had existed between them. Finally, with no guide from Merriman, he understood.

"You came because of me. Because I was angry."

As he said it, he felt the something of the old peace touch him again.

"You know that your anger is dangerous Old One, dangerous enough to call me out of time. The Dark cannot return in its previous manifestation but remember when I warned you to guard against it in other forms, Will. You have to forget a little too, and then you will remember yourself and what you are."

Merriman's leonine face was full of the warmth and knowing that Will had always drawn such strength from.

"Will, I think it is time for you to go home. Go and see your parents for Christmas. And then you should think about helping Bran. There will be plenty of fools around to flatter and fawn on him, as there were for his father. He will need one such as you, Will. Not all good things come blazing in light or bad things dripping in horror but he will still need a watchman. You must learn some of your first lessons over again."

"Merriman, are you trying to tell me to grow up?"

Merriman laughed out loud, throwing back his white mane, such a sight that even the bickering family stopped arguing to look at him and he smiled a beneficent smile on them. They smiled back, uncertainly.

"Happy birthday Will," Merriman stood and held out his hand. "Come, you have walked the snail's way too long. We can find our way to your parents' home in a more suitable style, no?"

Will reached out and took Merriman's hand in a firm grasp.

And then they were outside the Stantons' farmhouse. Max's car was there, and Stephen's. Will could hear the voices of his nieces and nephews, carolling the excitement of Christmas around the house.

"A long way to go just to come home again," he said quietly.

"The journey of all lives, I think," replied Merriman. "Even ours."

 

 

 


End file.
